Fishe

Inspiration

Despite advances in marine science and the increasing importance of marine fish to a healthy, growing human population, we lack even basic scientific data for half the global fish catch. Accurate and detailed data is of paramount importance as sustainable fisheries management and stock assessment is underpinned by timely and accurate biological species data, consequently Biologists urgently need more innovative and cost effective approaches to fisheries data collection to enable fish stock assessments and effective management so fishermen can continue to sustainably provide seafood for future generations.

We have fishermen going out to fish randomly with little or no formal education or information as to when are the best times/dates/season to go out fishing and for maximum yield. This leads to inefficient fishing expeditions as they either don’t get the(type of) fish they go for, or get less than what they would have if they had gone out better informed as to fish population.

Before Fishe, effective data collection tools to monitor fish populations trends, migration patterns and other significant data has been lacking.

What it does

The Fishe Solution leverages the existing ecosystem of fishermen and fish traders to collect vital data on the population patterns of different species of fish in the lake for example the Nile Perch. The platform offers a means through which fishermen record their daily catch and links them to buyers. Through this means, the fishermen are incentivized to use the app and by so doing create a symbiotic relationship whereby key fish population data is collected while they receive market linkage for their catch.

How we built it

We developed a Ruby on Rails backend to act as an api engine recieving REST requests from an android client. The engine was hosted on the Heroku platform. The mobile app is hosted in the Google Play store.

Challenges we ran into

Due to the time alloted to develop the product we were limited to desktop research. We did not have available to us people knowledgeable in the fishing industry.
We were also unable to prepare a video presentation for our submission due to technical limitations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were honored to develop and deploy a solution we are proud of within the short time allocated for the fishackathon. Getting to win our chapter of the hackathon was also a big moral boost for the team.

What we learned

The hackathon exposed us to a world of opportunities that need to be addressed. It also helped refine our development process by exposing challenges in our methodologies. Applying agile development techniques like having scrum meetings was pretty new to us but we are glad to have had this opportunity to use them.

What's next for Fishe

The team has set out to run a pilot deployment as a proof of concept upon which we intend to further leverage other technological tools such as OpenCV and USSD to further improve the process and quality of data collected. We also look forward to growing the opensource community in and around Fishe.